Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 56

India’s Ways of (Non-) War: Explaining New Delhi’s
Forbearance in the Face of Pakistani Provocations
234 Dasgupta and Cohen, “Is India Ending Its Strategic Restraint Doctrine?” 163-77; Cohen
and Dasgupta, Arming without Aiming, especially ix-xiii and 1-28; Shidore, “India’s Strategic
Culture and Deterrence Stability on the Subcontinent”; Ali Ahmed, India’s Doctrine Puzzle:
Limiting War in South Asia (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 110, 115-50.
235 Cohen and Dasgupta, Arming without Aiming, xiii, 1.
236 Dasgupta and Cohen, “Is India Ending Its Strategic Restraint Doctrine?,” 163.
237 Cohen and Dasgupta, Arming without Aiming, 147.
238 Shidore, “India’s Strategic Culture,” 119, 135.
239 Shidore, “India’s Strategic Culture,” 135.
240 Presentation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, January
23, 2015.
241 Shidore, “India’s Strategic Culture,” 133-35. With respect to Twin Peaks, Shidore also cites
nuclear deterrence and U.S. crisis management as other causes of Indian restraint. On
Mumbai, he argues that “there is no evidence that the Cabinet Committee on Security seriously
considered a military response” (134). This is refuted by first-person accounts, including
Menon, Choices, 60-81.
242 Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese
History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Johnston differentiates between a
country’s “symbolic set” and its “operational set.” The former is a “symbolic or idealized set
of assumptions and ranked preferences”; the latter “reflects [a] hardpolitik strategic culture
[arguing] that the best way of dealing with security threats is to eliminate them through the
use of force.” x.
243 Ahmed, India’s Doctrine Puzzle, 130, 150. For a particularly convincing critique of the “strategic
restraint” logic in South Asia’s pre-nuclear era, see Rudra Chaudhuri, “Indian ‘Strategic
Restraint’ Revisited: The Case of the 1965 India–Pakistan War,” India Review 17, no. 1 (March
2018): 55-75.
244 Gill, “Military Operations,” 114-19, especially 115; Rajesh Rajagopalan, “India: The Logic of
Assured Retaliation,” in The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21 st Century Asia,
ed. Muthiah Alagappa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 204.
245 For a more complete summary of Indian military activities, see Ahmed, India’s Doctrine
Puzzle, 129.
246 Dasgupta and Cohen, “Is India Ending Its Strategic Restraint Doctrine?” 166-67.
247 Chari, Cheema, and Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process, 139.
248 MacDonald, Defeat Is an Orphan, 144.
249 Vipin Narang, “The Lines That Have Been Crossed,” The Hindu, October 4, 2016.
250 Ankit Panda and Vipin Narang, “Nuclear Stability, Conventional Instability: North Korea and
the Lessons from Pakistan,” November 20, 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/11/nuclearstability-conventional-instability-north-korea-lessons-pakistan/.
251 Devin T. Hagerty, “India’s Evolving Nuclear Posture,” Nonproliferation Review 21, no. 3–4
(September–December 2014): 307-8.
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